Rachel Kushner's top 10 books about 1970s art

The novelist picks out the best ways to discover a lost era of freewheeling invention and conceptual rigour

Robert Smithson's benchmark 1970 'earthwork', Spiral Jetty. A 1,500ft spiral made of 6,650 tons of black basalt, it is located on, and most of the time beneath, a Utah salt lake. Photograph: George Steinmetz/Corbis

I have selected 10 of the many incredible books about art in the 1970s that were piled around my desk like a miniature city as I wrote my most recent novel, The Flamethrowers. They were books I'd collected over the last two decades or so and had looked at many, many times, read many times (some of them collections of essays, others, full colour-plate monographs). The 1970s were a time of freewheeling ideas but also conceptual rigour: art outside the studio, in the form of a dance, a dare, a gesture, a practical joke.

In trying to narrate a novel through the eyes of a very young woman encountering the world of downtown New York in 1975, I looked, and then looked again, to see with freshness, what my narrator might have seen of a freer, grittier, uniquely inspired era in downtown New York City, when Gordon Matta-Clark sawed a house in half, Tehching Hsieh punched a time clock on the hour every hour 24 hours a day for a year, and Lee Lozano stopped speaking to women as a minor art project that ended up lasting the rest of her life.

DeLillo's first novel, published in 1971, shows a deep understanding of visual culture and the logic of advertising, which has everything to do with the gestures and ideas of the artists who came to preeminence in that decade. "The war was on television every night but we all went to the movies," he writes. This book understands its moment and the decade to come. Its crazy penultimate and almost inexplicable scene, of people guzzling beer and having an orgy in an automotive garage, is a lesson and inspiration.

2. Six Years: the Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 by Lucy Lippard

Perhaps this book is cheating, as it's an annotated chronology listing pretty much every thing and everybody that was important to the years listed in the title. It's exhaustive, and impossible to reduce, but here's how she describes one work by the great Douglas Huebler: "Eight people were photographed at the instant exactly after each had been told: 'you have a beautiful face' or 'you have a very special face,' or 'you have a remarkable face.' Or in one instance, nothing at all."

3. The Destruction of Lower Manhattan by Danny Lyon

Danny Lyon is one of my favorite photographers. Although the images included in this book, documenting an enormous area of lower Manhattan being demolished to make way for the Twin Towers, were made in 1966 and 1967, they contribute greatly to our understanding of the early 1970s as a time when artists in New York City haunted the dying grounds of industry.

4. Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia, edited by Richard Hertz

A fascinating collection of interviews and anecdotes. Seemingly about the Southern California of the CalArts programme in the early 1970s, it's really about the artists who became known as the "Pictures Generation". The centre of this scene was the enigmatic and tragic Jack Goldstein. The book is filled with his reflections on life and art in the 1970s.

5. Uncommon Places by Steven Shore

Uncommon common places, that is. Shore is well-loved, well-known photographer, but each viewing of these images brings a new charge and delight. This may in part be due to the fact that the American worlds they depict are more or less vanished, and so it's something special to revisit them. Most stores, motels, and restaurants that aren't sterile, corporate chains are gone. The cars are gone. . Most significantly for art and for a decade, what is gone is a photographic technique that merges the casual and off-hand with the hyper-deliberate: Shore used an 8x10 view camera and colour film; he had to set up each shot with a tripod, and exposures took time. The cost to produce each photo was $15, and that's in 1970s money. Now everywhere and they cost nothing. Shore's were specific, deliberate choices: life stilled for an expanded look.

In the summer of 1976, Warhol bought a second Rolls Royce, an old, rare station wagon. He already owned a Rolls Silver Shadow, for which he paid cold cash but told people he traded it for art. This book of recorded phone conversations arranged as diary entries, which begin just after the purchase of the second Rolls, is important not for understanding the art of the 1970s but for understanding, instead, Warhol's total commitment by the late 1970s to money, fame, and socialites. Some people love this bitchy Andy. I don't. And yet I read and read, fascinated. Of Jim Jones's Guyana massacre, Andy laughs and says: "Just think, if they'd used Campbell's Soup I'd be so famous, I'd be on every news show, everyone would be asking me about it. But Kool-Aid was always a hippie thing."

7. You Are the Measure by Gordon Matta-Clark

Matta-Clark's cuts in empty and abandoned buildings seem almost like tandem gestures to Danny Lyon's documentation of sixty acres of Manhattan turned to rubble. Both Lyons and Matta-Clark toured forlorn urban spaces on the eve of their destruction, except in the case of Matta-Clark, he took cross-sections of beam, drywall, linoleum, and displayed them as art. His most famous work, Splitting, from 1974, took place in Inglewood, New Jersey. My aunt Dee-Dee Halleck, friends with Matta-Clark, took her three sons to see the house cut in half. She was going through a divorce at the time "Noo!" her sons cried. "Don't cut that house in half!! No!" This story amuses and touches me for perhaps obvious reasons. The catalogue, from yet another timely retrospective of 70s art that I saw while writing The Flamethrowers, wonderfully lays out the scope and poignancy of Matta-Clark's work and interventions.

8. Game Plan by Alighiero Boetti

The mysterious and under-sung Italian artist Alighiero Boetti had a long-awaited retrospective at the Tate Modern just as I was heading into the home stretch of finishing The Flamethrowers. This show and its beautiful catalogue, including an essay by theorist Jason Smith linking Boetti to the political turbulence in Italy in the 1970s, came not a moment too soon. Boetti died in 1994, but some of his very best work was made in the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as the paintings he did using factory motorcycle colours from Moto Guzzi and Moto Gilera, works that bring together Italian factory politics and conceptual art in a way that I almost could have made up, but I didn't.

9. The Collected Writings by Robert Smithson

A singular vision of nature, time, industry, culture, film, and entropy, combined with a graphomanic need to get it all down on paper. A few favourite kernels from this thick slab of ideas: "To spend time in a movie house is to make a 'hole' in one's life." "Somehow, I can accept graffiti on subway trains, but not on boulders." "I find what's vain more acceptable than what's pure … any tendency toward purity also supposes that there's something to be achieved, and it means that art has some sort of point."

This is the motherlode, as a crash course on the art and artworld social scene of the 1960s and early 1970s in downtown New York, with in-depth portraits of the main personalities, in all their glory and sordidness. Rainer, a dancer and filmmaker, choreographed a world of dance as life: task-like, mundane. A critic once said, "Someday there will be a real murder in one of Yvonne Rainer's dances." There was not. But her personal experiences in an art world filled with egos and desire and turbulent gender politics leaves the curious-minded more than satisfied that murderous thoughts were had.